Dan's Papers - August 1, 2008

If you haven't seen the new Batman movie, stop what you are doing right now and go see it. No, wait, don't do that. Finish reading this column, THEN go see it.

I'm still a little shaken after the movie experience I just had while watching The Dark Knight. I went into the movie with incredibly high expectations because of all the positive reviews and hype. Ninety-nine percent of the time that I do this, I end up walking out a little bit disappointed because my expectations were too high. This had me worried about going to The Dark Knight.

I can tell you this, even when going into the movie with the highest of expectations, you walk out in a stunned state of mind. There is so much to it, both big and small. You can make points about The Dark Knight on as small a scale as, "That was a really cool fight scene" to "Did you notice the parallelism of Batman stopping a criminal from being tortured and Guantanamo?"

It is a big, big movie.

In hindsight, quite possibly the most amazing scene in this movie for me was when I found myself completely captivated with an audience of 100 people. It was a car scene in which the Joker is chasing down Harvey Dent and Batman is trying to stop him. Pretty run-of-the-mill, right? Well, not really. This entire chase scene is done without any music, and the rawness of Heath Ledger's Joker is mesmerizing. He is so sloppy and human as a criminal, using deliberate acts of rage as he shoots out at the car with various weapons. The audience and I were completely sucked in as we tried to process as best we could what we were seeing.

Heath Ledger in this movie is not Heath Ledger. He is The Joker. While watching his portrayal, you really got the sense that Ledger is actually a psychopath simply playing up a role that was offered to him. Where this came from is beyond me. I've seen other movies he's done and was never impressed by his acting. And in general, I am not impressed by actors. Probably the only time I was ever captured by an actor was when Tom Hanks played Forrest Gump. Heath brings the Joker to that level.

On top of that, the Joker as a character is remarkably interesting. He is a criminal for the sake of being a criminal and by the middle of the movie, you understand him.

There is so much more to be said. The tool that Batman uses to track down the Joker can target anybody in the world that uses a cell phone. Batman's right-hand man explains to him that this is too much power for one man to have, which brings you right into the wiretapping debate as Batman moves forward to use the tool, and then destroys it in the end so that it is never used again.

Another scene that just completely blows you away is when two bombs are planted on large ferries, one filled with regular people, the other filled with convicted criminals. At midnight both ferries will blow, but only one will blow if somebody on the ferry decides to turn a key that will blow up the other. The whole time this drama goes down, you wonder to yourself what you would do, and you panic because it is hard to tell how you would handle something like this.

The writers could have blown up both ferries; they could have had the convicts blow up the good people, or vice versa, and it would have been a good scene. But they didn't. They showed that people in general are still good people, even in such situations. And it completely messes with your head, but in a very good way because it shows hope.

I can't get enough of that huge trombone that belts out the Batman theme.

I can't get enough of this movie.

God bless Warner Bros. for bringing back an epic as big as The Matrix, and my hat is off to the filmmakers in show business that have made this summer such a fun time to be at the movies.